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Helping you to Manage your Money

Setting up a budget will allow you to rein in your spending in simple terms it is a check of how much money you are earning against how much you are spending. Once you know which way the needle is swinging, you can either kerb your spending or treat your self a bit more.

Setting up a budget is easy in BankTree Personal Finance, just follow these steps:

You can do this by adding all your accounts into the BankTree Personal Finance software; create a new account for each financial institution. Each cash account in the software is treated the same so you do not need to worry about setting current accounts or credit cards differently.

2) Find your actual spend.

You can do this by importing your bank statements from you online banks; most institutions offer a statement download facility. You can pick Microsoft Money or Quicken file formats as these are compatible with our software. You can also manually add entries to your accounts.

3) Set up your categories.

By clicking on the categories section (tools menu), you can review and amend the existing categories. Categories need to be specific helping you to work out where you are spending your money, for example it would no good just having a Bills category rather you should use Bills: Electric, Bills: Gas etc.

4) Work out your budget

For each category, on the category section, you can then assign an average or a monthly budget. Average budgets are not just limited to weekly; you can select this for fortnightly, monthly, annually etc. With an average budget, you do not have a break during the budget period, if however, your budget will change month to month you can set up a monthly budget.

5) Check what you spend against what you earn.

By running the budget reports, you will be able to track what you are actually spending against your budget. Select a yearly date range to see your spending habits over a year.